Illustration: Taking Line For A Walk

Taking Line For A Walk was a day long project about observational line drawings, so it was quite loose, focusing us on getting to observe the shape of faces rather than worry about tone. I enjoyed this as by the end of the day I really was just looking at the main shapes to clearly convey a face, working slowly to observe the shapes fully.

We started with observational drawings from people using a range of materials, like pens, crayons on collage backgrounds.

I love working on collage backgrounds as they really reduce any pressure of working on white paper. Although getting the composition of them right was sometimes hard and then matching the drawings and materials to them as well. We've been doing a lot of loose drawings, but I still find them useful - these helped me to remain loose with line, while slow down to study the faces more.

We moved onto drawing on large strips of paper, still working from observation. To begin with I was a bit confused as everyone had to stand around the sheets of paper and draw the person opposite, but then we had to move around and change position. As everyone moved around the strips of paper filled with images, which looked initially messy, but when they were put on the wall you could pick out odd faces or features. It was a great process for building up a giant piece of work quickly.

I did find my drawings getting worse though as they started out resembling the person, even though we weren't allowed to look at the paper when drawing, then as the paper became filled my drawings became more abstract. I found this really interesting though as it seemed like my mind's perception of what the paper looked like influenced my drawing.

For the rest of the day we made wire drawings, which I'd never done before, but I loved them. I never knew that wire could be manipulated like line to form an image that even resembled a drawing (even in my drawing style), while being almost 3D. I was surprised at how easy it was to bend the wire and how expressive you could get the faces, which I thought would be limited by the bends in the wire.

Before we started though we looked at a few examples, one of which was this piece by Gavin Worth. I think it's amazing as I'd never considered that wire could be used for such detail and still convey a specific sense of style in observational work.

Morning Pose, Gavin Worth

 Image from:http://www.gavinworth.com/morningpose.html

My wire drawings:

I really liked as well how you can imply hair from the shape of the hair line as well. I tried to use as little joins as possible, mostly using just one piece of wire, as I wanted a continuous line look to make them look like drawings. Even when I did join pieces together I tried to attach them first by bending them together to make the join look more natural.

Overall, it was a day that simultaneously caused me to loosen up and only focus on the main shapes of the face to commit them down quite quickly, while forcing me to really look at little shifts in shape to get a better sense of the face and commitment to line in the drawings. It also caused some dents in my fingers from bending the wire as well, but it was worth it.